Packet switching fabrics may represent a cost-effective solution for backplane switching in systems such as blade servers and/or enterprise and/or metro area routers. In such fabrics, data flowing through the systems are transported as unsegmented packets, thereby avoiding costly segmentation and/or reassembly circuitry or logic.
A limitation in such systems is that the transport of unsegmented packets may result in congestion within the switching fabric. For example, when the switching fabric transfers packets received at a plurality of ingress ports to a single egress port, congestion may occur at the egress port if the aggregate data transfer rate of the plurality of ingress ports to the egress port is greater than the rate at which the switching fabric transfers packets from the egress port.
When congestion occurs, many conventional packet switching fabrics may utilize packet dropping methods that result in a packet, received at an ingress port, being discarded within the switching fabric. This may result in requirements that upper layer protocols (ULPs) detect and/or undertake recovery actions in response to the packets dropped within the switching fabric. This may further, impose limitations on applications, for which the ULPs do not detect and/or undertake recovery actions in response to dropped packets within the switching fabric.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.